Category: Tradition, Culture, Religion

‘Virginity Testing’ to End for Yezidi Rape Survivors

“Luna,” was captured by ISIS fighters when they swept through northern Iraq in August 2014.

She was sold four times and raped by all her “owners.” She was one of hundreds of Yezidi women and girls who had similar experiences.

Some of them eventually escaped and were reunited with their community, who took refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan. But that wasn’t the end of their ordeal.

Survivors my colleague and I interviewed,  described  organized rape, sexual slavery, and forced marriage by ISIS. They were in dire need of health care, counselling and other services to help them begin to recover from their ordeal.

Kurdistan officials took their needs seriously, but subjected some unmarried women and girls to “virginity tests” –an abusive and inaccurate procedure– as part of a forensic, post-rape examination.  Judge Ayman Bamerny, who heads a committee gathering evidence of ISIS crimes, told us these tests were seen as evidence of rape by Iraqi courts.

 

By Rothna Begum

Read the full article from Human Rights Watch

Tony Abbott jets to US to address abortion and gay-marriage opponents Alliance Defending Freedom

Fresh from giving new hope to disaffected conservative Liberals by staying in federal politics, Tony Abbott will fly to the United States on Tuesday to gee-up one of the religious right’s most reactionary bodies, the Alliance Defending Freedom.

Mr Abbott, who is being accompanied by wife Margie, will give a speech on the topic of “the importance of family” to the pro-Christian, Republican-aligned lobby, which opposes abortion, wants to end gay marriage and is pushing to roll back some feminist advances.

he speech comes as the primary race for the presidential nomination approaches fever pitch, with contenders on the Republican side scrambling to secure the overwhelmingly Christian “Tea Party” base.

The Alliance Defending Freedom’s founding president, Alan Sears, is a regular conservative voice on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News channel and co-authored the 2003 book, The Homosexual Agenda: Exposing the Principal Threat to Religious Liberty Today.

With Craig Osten, Sears argued that America’s growing tolerance of homosexuality was being achieved through the indoctrination of children, tacit support of corporate America, and through “positive” television depictions of alternative family structures.

 

By Mark Kenny
Read the full article on the Sydney Morning Herald website

OURs - News piece

Protecting Pakistan’s Girls Isn’t ‘Blasphemy’

A female member of Pakistan’s parliament recently introduced legislation to set the minimum age for marriage at 18 for women as well as men. Under current Pakistani law, it’s 16 for women.

On January 14, her proposal was withdrawn by a parliamentary committee after the Council of Islamic Ideology, a body established in 1962 to advise the parliament on Islamic law, denounced the change as “anti-Islamic” and “blasphemous.”

This decision keeps Pakistan on the wrong side of human rights protections in the Islamic world. Change is happening on child marriage, including in countries that, like Pakistan, are committed to upholding Islamic values. In 2009, Afghanistan, an Islamic republic, set tough new penalties for child marriage. The prime minister of Bangladesh, another majority Muslim country, has pledged to end all child marriage by 2041.

Twenty-one percent of girls in Pakistan marry before age 18. Globally, 700 million women alive today married before they were 18, and almost half of all child brides live in South Asia.

 

By Heather Barr
Read the full article from Human Rights Watch

OURs - News piece

Fed-up Iranian women organize to take more seats in parliament

Nine women and 281 men. Such is the composition of the Iranian parliament. Rights activists believe this lopsided gender imbalance is one reason why so many discriminatory laws against women have been passed by the current legislature, in office since 2012.

Ahead of the upcoming Feb. 26 parliamentary elections, a group of women’s rights activists organized Changing the Male-Dominated Face of the Parliament, a campaign to address the dearth of women in the legislature.

The campaign criticizes incumbent female members of parliament’s failure to pursue women’s rights and also encourages Iranian women to participate in the next elections as candidates as well as voters. The goal, stated on the group’s website, is to win “at least 50 seats for egalitarian women.” To achieve this objective, members of the campaign have also formed committees such as Red Cards for Anti-Women Candidates, I Will Be a Candidate and 50 Seats for Egalitarian Women.

So far, the number of registered female candidates for this year’s election is three times greater than the number who registered to run in 2012. It is unclear, however, how many of the 1,234 prospective candidates will be disqualified by the Guardian Council, which vets all registered hopefuls. In addition, an unprecedented 16 women have also registered to run in Assembly of Experts elections, to be held concurrently with the parliamentary balloting.

In the 1980 legislative elections, the Islamic Republic’s first, only four women earned seats. Serving alongside 324 male counterparts, these female members of parliament comprised slightly more than 1% of representatives. More broadly, with the exception of the fifth parliament, which took office in 1996, the percentage of women members of parliament has never exceeded 6%. In the current parliament, only 3% of members of parliament are female.

 

By Zahra Alipour
Read the full article on the Al Monitor website

Bill banning child marriage fails in Pakistan after Council deems ‘un-Islamic’

Pakistani lawmakers had to withdraw a bill aimed at curbing the practice of child marriage after a prominent religious body declared the legislation un-Islamic.

The bill, which proposed raising the marriage age for females from 16 to 18, also called for harsher penalties for those who would arrange marriages involving children. Despite the laws in place, child marriages, particularly involving young female brides, are common in parts of the country. It’s estimated that some 20 percent of girls in the country are married before they turn 18.

But the Council of Islamic Ideology, a constitutional body which gives advice to parliament on the compatibility of laws with Sharia, appeared to slap down the legislation after deeming it “un-Islamic” and “blasphemous,” according toAgence France Presse. It had already handed down a similar ruling in 2014.

Read the full article on the Washington Post now. 

Lawyer faces death threats over petition for women to enter Sabarimala temple

The head of a lawyers group fighting for the right of women to enter the famous Sabarimala Ayyappa temple in Kerala said on Thursday he had received hundreds of death threats warning him to drop the petition in the Supreme Court.

The popular Hindu temple is one of a few in India which bar women of reproductive age, only allowing entry to girls aged under 10 and women over 50.

The ban came under legal scrutiny after the Indian Young Lawyers’ Association (IYLA) filed a petition in the Supreme Court seeking entry for all women, prompting the court on Monday to ask temple authorities to explain the ban.

IYLA President Naushad Ahmed Khan said he had since received over 300 death threats on his cell phone – prompting police to provide him with a personal security guard.

“I have received more than 700 telephone calls, including some calls from international telephone, since Wednesday. These callers are (trying to) force me to withdraw the petition,” Khan told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“I am the president of the IYLA, and the plea has been filed by the organisation. I have never been personally involved with this petition,” he said, adding that the question of whether the petition would be withdrawn had not arisen.

 

Reporting by Suchitra Mohanty, writing by Nita Bhalla, editing by Tim Pearce.
Read the full article from the Thomson Reuters Foundation

Young Gambian Woman (photo: Allan Hopkins)

The Gambia bans female genital mutilation

President Yahya Jammeh outlaws practice that affects three-quarters of women in west African country.

The Gambia has announced it will ban female genital mutilation (FGM) after the Guardian launched a global campaign to end the practice.

The president, Yahya Jammeh, said last night that the controversial surgical intervention would be outlawed. He said the ban would come into effect immediately, though it was not clear when the government would draft legislation to enforce it.

FGM involves cutting female genitalia – often when girls are young – to remove their labia and clitoris, which often leads to lifelong health complications, including bleeding, infections, vaginal pain and infertility. More than 130 million women worldwide are subjected to the procedure in Africa and the Middle East.

The practice is widespread in many African countries, including the Gambia, where 76% of females have been subjected to it. The age at which FGM takes place in the Gambia is not recorded, but it is reported that the trend of practicing FGM on infant girls is increasing. By the age of 14, 56% of female children in the country have had the procedure.

 

By Kate Lyons
Read the full article on The Guardian website

Pernicious work of World Congress of Families fuels anti-LGBTQ sentiment

The global influence of a controversial Christian coalition poses a serious threat to the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people.

November has brought rough times for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) rights. First, voters in Houston, Texas rejected the city’s equal rights ordinance, which would have banned discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Then lawmakers in Russia presented a draft bill that would criminalise any public displays of affection that don’t conform to “traditional sexual relations”. Russia had already banned the promotion of homosexuality in 2013, but apparently this didn’t sufficiently suppress the LGBTQ community.

In both cases, support for the reactionary initiatives was driven, in part, by activists deep in the US heartland. The World Congress of Families (WCF), based in Rockford, Illinois, is an international network of socially conservative activists and NGOs that has been active since 1997. Its organisational partners, which span six continents, work in areas ranging from grassroots counselling to direct lobbying of parliamentarians.

 

By Gillian Kane and Cole Parke

Read the full article from The Guardian website

 

Ban ‘triple talaq’, says Muslim women’s group

The Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA) on Friday called for a ban on the “triple talaq” divorce system, saying it was un-Islamic and outlawed in several Muslim countries.

“The Quran gives rights to Muslim women during marriage and does not recognise triple talaq,” the group said in a resolution passed at its ninth annual convention here.

“Yet, this evil practice prevails in India. It should be banned like several Muslim countries (have done),” it added.

At the same time, the gathering rejected the idea of an Uniform Civil Code and called upon the government to initiate urgent measures towards reforms in Muslim personal law.

A BMMA statement quoted co-founder Noorjehan Safia Niaz as saying how India urgently needed a codified Muslim personal law based on the Quranic principles of justice and equality.

Zakia Soman, another co-founder, spoke about how an Uniform Civil Code was not the answer to Muslim womens’ quest for justice.

This can happen only by reform in Muslim personal law where matters such as age of marriage, divorce and polygamy can be regulated, she said.

 

Read the full article on the Online India website

Modern Orthodox Judaism says ‘no’ to women rabbis

Women who would be Orthodox rabbis were handed a major setback Friday (Oct. 30) when the highest religious body for Modern Orthodox Jews ruled against their ordination.

The Rabbinical Council of America officially prohibited the ordination of women, or the use of the term “rabbi” or “maharat” for women, in what it described as a direct vote of its membership.

The prohibition comes six years after the founding of a yeshiva, or religious school, for women in New York City. The school, Yeshivat Maharat, has ordained less than a dozen women who use the honorific “maharat” instead of rabbi and has placed graduates and interns at 17 Orthodox synagogues in the U.S. and Canada.

The resolution states, “RCA members with positions in Orthodox institutions may not ordain women into the Orthodox rabbinate, regardless of the title used; or hire or ratify the hiring of a woman into a rabbinic position at an Orthodox institution; or allow a title implying rabbinic ordination to be used by a teacher” in an Orthodox institution.

The RCA is made up of more than 1,000 Orthodox rabbis — all men — in 14 countries in North and South America and Israel. Its members are mostly Modern Orthodox Jews who integrate traditional Jewish practices and beliefs while engaging with the secular world. About 10 percent of American Jews consider themselves Orthodox.

 

By Kimberly Winston
Read the full article from the RNS website